Graphic Nonfiction

I'm not a fan of comic books or even graphic novels that much, though I have come to appreciate some of them more than I thought I would. I realized not too long ago that it's probably has something to do with my form of neurodivergence, which just doesn't find the nonlinear visual page as easy to get content from as the written one.

But what I have found much more to my liking is the smaller category of what I guess must be called graphic nonfiction, for lack of a better term.

That could take the form of single graphics like this one Michael Leddy shared with me about the mental load women carry for men in their lives. Or this one by writer Ranae Hanson and two artist helpers, explaining how she came to perceive the connection between being diagnosed with diabetes and facing the climate crisis. Or the multi-pagers that end many issues of Yes magazine.

Often, though, it takes the form of an entire book. I thought I would list some of my favorites.

Probably the first ones I read were memoirs: Persepolis (and Persepolis 2) by Marjane Satrapi. Then Fun Home by Allison Bechdel.

I might have come across Guy Delisle's Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea next. Then Parecomic by Carl Thompson and Sean Michael Wilson, which is one of my favorite topic explainers on a topic I return to often in my thoughts.

Probably next was Gene Luen Yang's two-book young adult set, Boxers and Saints, which is more historical fiction than nonfiction, but so historically grounded that I think it counts. Then in 2017 on a trip to Montreal I found a copy of Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story by Peter Bagge at the Drawn and Quarterly shop.

I've wanted to write about each of these books at some point over the years, and realize I probably never will fully, so I thought I would recognize them together for what they have in common. There are a lot of differences, too, of course, but their strength binds them.

Creating Doubt and Delay

Have you ever heard that 90-some percent of climatologists or climate scientists agree that climate change is human-caused, and then thought to yourself, I wonder who those outliers are? 

I've figured it sometimes had to do with who was paying for their research, but I held out the possibility that some of it was pure contrarianism. I guess I still do a bit.

But after reading this thread from Ben Franta, I think the money has more to do with it. Franta got a Ph.D. in applied physics and then changed his mind to pursue a second Ph.D. in history of science, working on the history of climate politics and the role of science in policy-making. According to his bio on ClimateOne,

Franta is also an Associate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he earned a PhD in Applied Physics. While at Harvard, he was also a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government.

Here's what he thinks is going on with those contrarians:

Something wildly under-appreciated is that climate is a tightly controlled field. A handful of “climate gurus,” often funded by the oil industry itself, dictate the climate education for many future leaders in elite universities. This promotes intellectual and ideological homogeneity, often in the fossil fuel industry’s favor.

For instance, at Harvard, where I helped to teach the College’s primary climate change course twice, I (and countless other students) were taught that:

1. Climate change is a “wickedly complex” problem and essentially unsolvable
2. Solar and wind are incapable of replacing fossil fuels in the foreseeable future
3. Carbon pricing is the only policy that makes sense — and is unworkable at anything less than a global scale
   

Moreover, we learned nothing about political obstruction, lobbying or decades of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. I learned of the politics of climate change from the divestment movement — a group actively opposed and marginalized by many of Harvard’s “climate gurus.”

This sort of consolidation of power in a small number of gurus is improper.

For one, it confuses expertise in one aspect of a field for expertise in all of it. Being an expert in paleo-climate or ground hydrology doesn’t make one an expert in politics or history, or instance. Second, one disciplinary perspective alone cannot solve the problem. When a small number of “climate gurus” are in charge of education (gurus who, again, are often dependent on Big Oil’s approval for funding), students miss out on important ways to understand the climate crisis.

Thankfully this is beginning to change as a greater range of researchers (especially social scientists) move their attention to climate change, not a moment too soon. Still, we should be aware of how climate has been deeply influenced, by individuals and companies, for many years.

I learned a lot from that. In a way it's not surprising (big corporations pay things at the Ivy Leagues! who knew!) but the specifics are still revealing of the mechanisms of how things work.

A Libby Kid

Another mid-century find from my childhood from Cory Doctorow:

I remember these products, just barely. My family didn't buy them, though we did buy TV dinners. I imagine we bought the cheap ones, rather than the over-packaged ones that had stuff for kids specifically. Or maybe I was just a bit too old by the time these came out (1972, when I would have been 12 or 13).

Now, I mostly notice the Bookman Swash typeface and the silly copy writing.

And it makes me think of one of my favorite remembered ad slogans from childhood, which was also for a Libby product. They had a mascot character for a time called Libby the Kid, who he ended his ads by saying, "I'm Libby the Kid! That's Billy the Kid spelled sideways. Sort of."

That always struck me funnier than it did anyone else.

There She Is, Miss Generica

I manage a group on Facebook, so that means I have to decide whether to let people into the group. We have a very low bar to entry: do you live somewhere in or near Minnesota?

That's the only question we ask in order to be admitted, but some people don't bother to answer it anyway. So when that happens I go and snoop on their page to see if I can tell from their publicly visible posts whether they are from somewhere relatively near here.

Many people have their page's privacy settings so that the public (people who are not their "friends") can only see their profile photos. That's reasonable. But you can often still tell a enough about a person just from those photos. (Maybe they included something about the Minnesota Twins, a state park in the background, or some other detail recognizable to a person who's from here.)

While snooping a page recently, I saw a bunch of profile photos from what could be the most generic American white woman. Her images are so generic, I'd almost think she isn't real, except that many of them had likes and comments:

Whew... and there were more where that came from.

Thinking of Philando Castile

A few days ago I spent some time in contemplation at the site where Philando Castile was shot and killed by St. Anthony police officer Geronimo Yanez in July 2016. I've posted about the site before and about the day after he was killed, not far from my house.

The suburb of Falcon Heights has just renamed that stretch of street after Philando, and as I saw the other day, there's an effort to raise money to build a Peace Garden on the site in his honor:

The garden design includes a circular bench, designed by Saint Paul artist Seitu Jones, that refers to the angles Philando's car seat was at. The arc is defined by points related to times and places in his life.

Last spring, plants were put into the garden area, according to some of the signs, including native perennials, but I didn't see signs of them yet when I was there. It's pretty early for newly planted native plants to be showing up. 

Here are the memorials that are still there now:

It's a quiet place, other than the constant stream of car traffic going past. 

I didn't see any cop cars. I've heard that enforcement of Driving While Black has declined greatly in Falcon Heights in the past five years.

100 Days: Great But Not Good Enough

Given everything about where we're at, it was inevitable: the first 100 days of the Biden administration have been great (compared to the past four years!) but they are nowhere near good enough.

It's an odd feeling. In some ways, they've been better than I expected in our current reality (oh yes, I know it could have gone much worse), but it's still disappointing and you could see it coming if you look back at some of the things that were written about what Biden needed to do. Yes, Manchin and Sinema, blah blah, we know that. But some in leadership are still dithering beyond those two, as if they think Republicans will ever "work across the aisle." As if they don't know Republicans have moved beyond being the Party of No — that's just Mitch McConnell. They're now the Party of No One But Us Should Be in Government.

David Perry @lollardfish got me thinking about this today. I wasn't planning to do anything about the 100 days thing. But he's right: obviously, the vaccine rollout and COVID rescue plan passing were excellent, and the introduction of the infrastructure bill is good so far. There are many other good beginnings, and not to mention just the relief of not worrying so much about who's being appointed to lifetimes of bad decisions. 

But the work on saving democracy from the minoritarian Right is weak tea and the Right is getting more entrenched in those efforts every day that passes.

January 6 and its immediate aftermath were a narrow window of opportunity that's fading, even without the full-court-press underway from the Right's PR machine to fake it away and keep telling us the 2020 election was stolen, as they are right now in Arizona with their bizarro recount. (Did you hear about that? There are almost no words to describe how bad that situation is.) And as they introduce bills in dozens of state legislatures to restrict voting, purge the rolls, and control the certification process.

We need to protect the right to vote nationwide, and we need to have a country that's a representative democracy or a democratic republic — but for either of those, you need free and fair elections by the people in all places. Including places that aren't considered states, like D.C. for sure, and Puerto Rico if they want to be a state. Gerrymandering needs to be done away with, so you don't get legislatures like Wisconsin's. The Electoral College — which is essentially a gerrymander — needs to be made irrelevant, one way or another as well. 

We can't be a country run by an ever-dwindling percent of the population. And the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress need to do everything in their power to make sure that doesn't happen.

A Startling Chart

I love a good-news chart, especially one related to climate change and renewable energy, though sometimes I can fool myself by not noticing that the years on the right side of the chart (the ones that show some drastic improvement) are in the future. Meaning they're speculative.

With that caveat, check out this chart:

The year farthest to the right is 2017. 

2017.

And wind and solar power dropped below gas ("natural" gas... fossil gas) in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

I kind of knew this, but at the same time I didn't really know they had both gone below gas, and definitely not that long ago.

Women and Men, Star Tribune Op-Eds, Month 3

Thirty-one days has April (or at least when you combine it with the end of March), so there are 31 days to assess in this month's count of gender balance on the Star Tribune's op-ed page, 2021. (If you'd like to compare to the previous months, here they are: Month 1/February and Month 2/March.)

• The cartoonists this month were 100% male. Not even Lisa Benson made it in this time. As I've said before, we love the house cartoonist Steve Sack, who makes up the lion's share of the material, but couldn't they balance a bit on the other days?
  
• There were 52 men writing this month, compared to 25 women, which makes the men 67.5% of the total... compared to 69% in February and 66.7% in January. They've clearly got their sweet spot right round two-thirds men.
• Women definitely did better among the local writers this month than last, with 46.3% of the bylines (compared to just 34% in March). Though two of them were conservative mouthpieces, which always irks me, since they're honorary men.
  
• This month we had two bylines with unidentifiable genders. One was for a piece by the editorial board of The Economist (I could hazard a guess, but I didn't, officially) and the other was a screed by a University of Minnesota Duluth frosh with the ambiguous name of Blaine, opining about how legalizing marijuana will turn us all into soma-drugged drones, a la Brave New World. It was a dismal piece but I have no idea what gender to assign to Blaine since my googling turned up no info on her/him/them.
  

I think I have one more month of counting in me to get to a third of a year at least.

 

You Can Change Your City

Yesterday's post comparing police killings in Columbus and Minneapolis reminded me that I meant to talk about Ashley Fairbanks' thoughts on how the Minneapolis police department compares to others. An Anishinaabe woman now living in Texas, Fairbanks posted this to her Twitter account (@ziibiing) several days before the Chauvin verdict:

It’s shocking how quickly people’s response to “I’m from Minneapolis” turned from “Must be cold” to “Oh, the place where the cops keep killing people.” But it’s not that we have more police violence— it’s that people decided to stop allowing it to be done in silence.

Why don’t I know the names of people being murdered by the police in Las Vegas, Denver, or Phoenix? Where is the outrage for the 78 people killed by the Houston police in the last 7 years?

So many Americans continue to believe the propaganda from the police departments, and the age-old rhetoric about “bad guys” and “good guys” that allows them to not question the use of force by their cops. Or the murders.

Out of 100 major cities, Minneapolis ranks 74th in the number of fatal police shootings. Which means, if you live in a large American city, your police are likely killing more people. Where are your protests? Where is your rage?

I don’t want to sound like I’m defending Minneapolis — I’m not. I’m just saying, Americans love to hide behind “well, at least we aren’t as bad as X” and it’s usually total bullshit.

I also want to say it was a relatively small amount of people, who were mostly Black and queer, who set this tone in Minneapolis, that it wasn’t good enough to protest for one day and go home and forget about Jamar Clark. Everyone owes them a huge debt of gratitude.

It’s crazy to think about the impact of a those organizers who decided to occupy the 4th precinct in 2015. They shaped the way Minneapolis thinks about and responds to police violence, and have impacted how people all over the world are thinking about a world beyond policing.

I say this to note. You can change your city. You and a few of your friends can decide to do something more. You can demand to be heard. You can demand justice. Another world is possible.

In saying that, Fairbanks clearly wasn't excusing Minneapolis or Minnesota (remember this chart about how bad Twin Cities police are in the disparity of their killing of Black people!), but pointing out that police killings are a systemic U.S. problem. 

By comparison, the U.K. has 20% of our population (65 million vs. 325 million) and police kill a minute fraction as many people. What are the stats on that, you ask?

Well, first, it was hard to know because the U.S. doesn't keep track. After Ferguson, and the widespread realization that there was no centralized database, the Washington Post began tracking police shootings in 2015 (I'm not sure if it's just shootings or it's all killings) in the United States. They show that: 

• between 2015 and 2018, U.S. police killed 3,309 people. So that averages to 827.25 people a year for 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. 
• Then in 2019, the Post found that U.S. police killed 1,099 people, 24% of whom were black.
• Then in 2020, according to Mapping Police Violence, U.S. cops killed 1,127.
  

In contrast, these are the numbers for the UK in the same years. It's painfully funny, because the Wikipedia page on this topic actually lists each individual person's name and the circumstances because there are so few:

• 2015 - 4
• 2016 - 5
• 2017 - 5
• 2018 - 1
• 2019 - 4
• 2020 - 5
  

World Population Review lists 2021 police killings so far per 10 million people in many countries around the world, and the wide gap between the U.S. and UK is evident. Some other peer nations fall in between, but the U.S. is still an outlier:

• UK: 0.5
  
• France: 3.8
• Sweden: 6
• Canada: 9.7
• US: 28.4

Merrick Garland's announcement yesterday of a Department of Justice pattern and practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department is good (as demonstrated in this Minnesota Reformer story from 2020, it's not just Derek Chauvin who's a problem, and even the good cops cover up for the bad ones). But the Columbus, Ohio, example also shows that it's true in many other cities. It's true in the suburbs. It's everywhere.

The problem is policing that was formulated from slave patrols in a slave-holding country, built on stolen land, now militarized by leaps and bounds as the number of guns on the streets has skyrocketed with encouragement from the NRA and the Right. 

And to add to the problem, "the police" are not one thing. They are set up in a decentralized system of more than 12,000 police and sheriff's departments across 50 states and however many counties and municipalities, so systemically changing how they operate is just about impossible without some major sea change that's hard to imagine. 

Which is where Fairbanks' point about organizers and activism comes in again. The changes needed are not going to come from within. Creating examples in particular places is a start, which could lead to adoption in other cities, possibly, along with some federal changes that would add other improvements. As Deray Mckesson said on MSNBC the other night, Biden could make some substantial changes at ATF, DEA, CBP, and ICE immediately that would affect a lot of people, which intersect policing in cities. 

That's what we're stuck with, I think, given our decentralized system. But we'll see if it can be pushed further this time.

In Case You Thought that Solved It

You probably heard that less than a half-hour after Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all counts in the killing of George Floyd, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was shot to death by police in Columbus, Ohio. But you may not have heard this: in the last five years, Columbus police have killed more than 30 people, most of whom were Black, including boys who were 13, 15, and 16. (Source.) 

The city of Columbus has a population of just under 900,000. That makes it a bit more than twice as large as the city of Minneapolis (which has about 430,000 people). According to this compilation from the Star Tribune, there were 8 police killings in Minneapolis in the same time period (one of which was George Floyd). 

So, 30 killings with just over twice the population... while neither example is good, that's pretty bad, Columbus.

__

Channel 9 News in Denver spent some resources and found out that at least 107 people other than George Floyd were killed in the U.S. since 2010 by cops who were pinning their victim to the ground. One of those people was Eric Garner. More than two-thirds of the dead were Black or Latino. 

And hey, did you know that back in 1995 the U.S. Department of Justice told U.S. police departments: “As soon as the suspect is handcuffed, get him off his stomach”?

__

The difference between accidental and negligent discharge of a cop's weapon, and why journalists shouldn't parrot police language. This Poynter Institute article gives a detailed analysis of how Brooklyn Center cop Kim Potter was negligent in the use of her gun when she shot Daunte Wright. 

The article doesn't get into the fact that the Brooklyn Center traffic stop was unneeded in the first place, and that Potter was clearly training a rookie in how to do pretextual stops. (For instance, that there are currently 500,000 vehicles in Minnesota with expired tabs in a state with just 6 million people, and expired tabs are in forbearance because of COVID.) That she stepped into the space between the rookie and Wright when the rookie bobbled the handcuffs, which were not needed in the first place because Minnesota law does not call for police to arrest a person who's wanted for a misdemeanor warrant. 

__

Tomorrow I'm going to go sit at the site where Philando Castile was shot and killed by Geronimo Yanez. I'll be thinking about him. And Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Rekia Boyd, Atatiana Jefferson, Botham Jean, Alton Sterling, Akai Gurley, Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald, Terence Crutcher, Sean Bell, Elijah McClain, Oscar Grant, Korryn Gaines, and the fact that there are other names I can't bring into my mind or never knew.

Go Along, Get Along: Walter Mondale, Minnesota

I like a lot of what Walter Mondale did in his life as much as the next white Minnesota migrant, but I also recognize he's a symbol of what's wrong about this place, too.

First, there's the way he made his way into Minnesota power politics as a young man, after he heard Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey speak. According to the Star Tribune, he knocked on doors and organized for Humphrey's Senate run in southern Minnesota, before doing a stint in the Army and then going to law school. And then:

In 1960, when Minnesota Attorney General Miles Lord resigned, Gov. Freeman appointed Mondale to replace him. Mondale was 32 years old and four years out of law school at the time.

Imagine if a person of any kind became Attorney General just four years out of law school because they had been a campaign worker for the sitting Senator. I imagine Mondale had worked at a law firm or maybe as a prosecutor or public defender for those four years, but was he qualified in any way to be Attorney General for the state? What?

As the Star Tribune story goes on to say,

"His style was such that Freeman, Rolvaag, Humphrey and other party seniors would find him politically reliable and personally compatible," former Star Tribune reporter Finlay Lewis wrote of Mondale in a 1980 biography. "Mondale's was the demeanor of a reasonable man who could be counted on not to offend or embarrass his allies."

That's quite an endorsement of political adroitness and the ability to fit into the good old boys network, I'd say.

Then four years later, as state Attorney General and Humphrey's political right-hand man, he helped screw the Black voters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party out of their rightful place at the 1964 Democratic Convention. 

This story (almost completely unknown nationally, little-known in Minnesota, and unmentioned as far as I can tell in the current round of obits) was told by former Star Tribune writer Eric Black on MinnPost in 2011.
 
In order to hand over the VP nomination, Lyndon Johnson essentially required Hubert Humphrey to bring a bunch of pesky Black Mississipians to heel. Mondale is the one who worked out the deal for Humphrey. He relayed this story at a public forum in the year 2000. As Eric Black tells it,

In 1964, Mississippi’s “regular” Democrats had sent their usual all-white delegation to the convention. A biracial group of civil-rights activists, calling themselves the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, came to the convention claiming to be the legal delegates, since the regular Democrats had used classic racist tactics, up to and including violence, to preclude any blacks from becoming delegates.

In exchange for letting an almost all-white delegation be seated at the convention (and excluding Fannie Lou Hamer particularly), Mondale's vaunted "deal" with MFDP was that no future Mississippi delegations chosen through race-biased procedures would be seated at the DNC:

The deal was adopted by the Credentials Committee and announced at a televised news conference before the Freedom Dems could discuss the plan, which Mondale later acknowledged was a mistake. When the Freedom Dems heard about it, Hamer publicly and famously responded: “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.”

At the 2000 Mondale forum, Ed King, a white minister [who] LBJ had approved for one of the two delegate seats, recalled a tense meeting during which Humphrey and a roomful of civil-rights heavyweights — including Roy Wilkins, Andrew Young, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and, yes, even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. himself — did Johnson’s bidding by pressuring the Freedom Dems to take the deal.

[Ed] King said that the final bitter pill that the Freedom Dems couldn’t swallow was that they wouldn’t even be allowed to choose which two of their members would get the token delegate positions. King wanted to give up his spot and allow the group to choose a substitute, knowing that Hamer would be chosen.

King quoted Humphrey as saying that Johnson had ordered him to make sure that “that illiterate woman” would never be a delegate.

So all of this is part of Walter Mondale's life, and a perfect mirror of how Minnesota operates both politically and socially — sacrificing the reality of Black and other people of color while thinking of itself as above average. Though it's very clear that one of the ways the state is above average is in its negative outcomes for people of color.
 

 

Closing Arguments

Over the weekend, reading about the wrap-up of the Chauvin trial and predictions about today's closing arguments by defense attorneys, I wondered how anyone is ever convicted of anything in this country. The lawyers made it sound as though reasonable doubt is so easy to establish for just one juror, which is all that it takes to hang a jury.

But we know that's not true: people are found guilty of things all the time, especially Black defendants. Even innocent people are found guilty (and occasionally later exonerated). 

Cop defendants, not so much, I know. Reasonable doubt for cops is pushed very far.

There are too many cases to mention where a cop (or cop wannabe) was acquitted or got a mistrial because of a hung jury, but here are just a few that came to the top as I was writing this.

Bree Newsome talked about George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin. She wrote:

I don’t know. I still remember the George Zimmerman trial. I assumed jurors would empathize with Trayvon and it wasn’t until after that I understood they didn’t because what happened to him would never happen to them or their sons. I don’t think there’s any reason to assume people are moved by video of Black people being murdered. It’s such an ingrained part of our society to make a public spectacle of Black people being killed as way of reinforcing our otherness.

Sarah Kendzior replied to Newsome:

I remember with Rodney King, the anticipation that it would be different, that the officers’ guilt was undeniable because this time the evidence was on video. I was a kid then and nothing has changed except there are more videos. No justice, only sequels.

I remember the outcome of the Geronimo Yanez trial, who killed Philando Castile, and I hate to admit that it still surprises me. I have heard since that it was exactly as I suspected: there was one juror who refused to acquit him and held out for a long time, but the other jurors wore that lone holdout down.

I was even more surprised, if that's possible, that the first trial of Michael Slater, the South Carolina cop who killed Walter Scott — who was completely unarmed and running away — initially resulted in a hung jury. (Slater later took a plea after federal civil rights charges were filed and he's serving 20 years.)

I did not watch today's closing arguments. But here are a couple of important things that happened.

Prosecutor Steve Schleicher, rebutting the defense's argument that George Floyd may have died from heart disease or a drug overdose while Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, said, "Is that commonsense? Or is that nonsense?"

And, still Schleicher: "This case is exactly what you thought when you saw it first, when you saw that video ... This wasn't policing. This was murder. The defendant is guilty of all three counts. All of them. And there's no excuse."

Later, defense attorney Eric Nelson said, "A reasonable police officer takes into account the safety of the person they're arresting." Huh. We agree about that!

But then he claimed it was reasonable for Chauvin to think George Floyd was pretending he was dying. Even though his own closing argument included video showing a bystander telling Chauvin the bystander had trained at the police academy and "that's some bullshit ... you're stopping his breathing."

Nelson also insulted the intelligence of everyone in the room with this comparison: "People sleep in the prone position, people suntan in the prone position, people get massages in the prone position."

A friend of mine on Facebook put it this way: "If Derek Chauvin's actions are reasonable, and representative of what any officer would do, good luck to all of us."

Writer and critic Toure said this on Twitter: "If Chauvin did what a reasonable police officer would do, then why is it his boss testified against him? Why is it no officer from his department came to testify on his behalf?"

From beginning to end, I think the prosecution did what prosecutors should do, in going after cops who kill, but which they don't usually do to this extent. 

Something I read in the past few days made the point that jurors have grown up with Law & Order and they expect some pizzazz in the closing arguments. I think prosecutor Jerry Blackwell met that standard, to finish out the job. His final words were:

“You were told Mr. Floyd died because his heart was too big. The truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr. Chauvin's heart was too small.”

It helps that what Blackwell said is clearly true and supported by the prosecution's case.

 

Anna Arnold Hedgeman

The Sunday Star Tribune includes a Minnesota History column by writer Curt Brown, which is both almost always worth reading and about someone I have never heard of. Today's subject is Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who grew up in Anoka, a town north of Minneapolis that's now considered a suburb, though it was a separate place before it was absorbed by the metro area. 

Anna Arnold was born in 1899 in Iowa, but moved with her family to Anoka as a child. They were the only Black family in Anoka. Like some of the indomitable early-20th-century Black Minnesota women I've mentioned earlier, she graduated from college here (Hamline University, in her case) before leaving the area because it denied her opportunity. She wanted to be a teacher, but 1922 Saint Paul told her it didn't hire Negroes.

It was Minnesota's loss. She left to work at an HBCU in the south, then worked for the YWCA in several states over the next 20 or so years. She worked on fair employment in the 1940s, for the mayor of New York in the 1950s, and ran for city council and Congress there. 

She was the only woman on the decidedly sexist planning committee for the March on Washington in 1963, and according to Brown's article, was responsible for bringing together Martin Luther King Jr.'s planned July march and A. Philip Randolph's planned October march into the single march we now know in August for Jobs and Freedom (with a side of Bayard Rustin organizing). She was also responsible, Brown says, for getting the only woman who spoke that day onto the speakers' list.

She wrote two books along the way, published in 1965 and 1977.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman lived to be 90 years old. She died in 1990 in New York City. What a life.

The Six: A Different Titanic Story

My knowledge of the sinking of the great ship Titanic long precedes the James Cameron movie. It comes from some combination of the movies A Night to Remember and The Unsinkable Mollie Brown, plus a Scholastic paperback version of A Night to Remember. I had my own instance of the baby-boomer-kid-obsession with the event, I guess, but probably not as badly as Daughter Number 2. (I was also interested in the Johnstown Flood and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. I must have liked disasters, rather than the usual white-girl obsession with horses.)

Like all of us at the time, we were not much informed about the steerage passengers on the ship. That came later, courtesy of Leo DiCaprio.

But only now have I learned about the six Chinese men —Lee Bing, Fang Lang, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Ah Lam and Chung Foo — who survived the sinking and who are the subjects of a new documentary. They were neither first class nor steerage: They were mariners, paying their way in third class as they traveled from one job to the next. 

When they arrived with the other passengers at the U.S. port on the rescue ship, they were denied entry to the U.S. and turned back, first to Cuba and then to the U.K. They were defamed as stowaways and said to have dressed as women to steal their seats on the lifeboats from a woman or child. The documentary investigates this and finds evidence that neither was true.

This was during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and they were dehumanized in the press instead of welcomed as survivors, like the other people who had been onboard. 

This BBC article about the documentary and this Twitter thread by Chinese-American Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding give some more of the story.

This Is Exactly Who "We" Are

My fellow white people, you know it is common to hear some of us say — each time a Black or brown person is killed by police (or some other outrage happens) — "This is not who we are." In Minnesota, the same thing is said about our state in particular. In case you didn't already know it, "we" are wrong.

This graph came through my feed yesterday, which makes it clear that this is exactly who we are:



(Click to enlarge for better viewing. I assume the data is based on the Minneapolis/Saint Paul metropolitan area, rather than Minneapolis specifically, since that is usually how national statistics are done.)

I saw the graph in the Twitter feed of Samuel Sinyangwe @samswey. He posted it in the context of news about the killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, and accompanied it with this comment:

Chicago police kill Black people at a rate 22x higher than white people and kill Latinx people at a rate 6x higher. This is the most extreme racial disparity in fatal police violence of any major city. The only place that comes close is Minneapolis.  

His stats came from mappingpoliceviolence.org. The running ticker on that site reports that as of today (April 16), police have killed 268 people in 2021.

__

Late addition: I saw this illustration of Minnesota's exact dichotomous treatment of Black and white people in police interactions just after I made this post. 

These two real situations and their outcomes happened a couple of days apart this week:

 

A Better Supreme Court

Biden has made noises about starting a commission to look at adding seats to the Supreme Court, which is all he had promised during the campaign. It's probably a slow road to no change, though.

I am in favor of adding seats to the court because the current number nine is not preordained anywhere. There were six until 1863, and when it was expanded to nine it was because that was the number of circuit courts at the time (with a national population of about 35 million). 

Now there are 13 circuit courts, and a national population almost 10 times as large. 

In addition, four of our current justices, with their lifetime appointments, were put on the court by presidents who were elected without winning the popular vote. Two of those were also put on after ethically reprehensible maneuvering by the Republican-controlled Senate. So those four are clearly minoritarian and some are also the beneficiaries of cheating.

And that's not even getting into the fact that two justices ("justices"!) — one who was appointed by a president who managed to win the popular vote — are known sexual harassers or assaulters. The harasser, let's not forget, also has a big pile of known conflicts of interest through his wife and her PAC and other activist connections. 

Personally, I'd be fine with impeaching all four of them (leaving just Samuel Alito — my favorite [!] — as the only Republican-appointed justice, since he's the only one appointed by a president who won with a majority of the popular vote and hasn't committed impeachable offenses, as far as I know), but in lieu of that, enlarging the court is an option.

In the long run, adding four more seats to the court to equal the number of circuit courts would be a good way to better serve our country, while also rectifying some of the wrongs done by the Republican Party's operatives over the past few decades.

Old Cookies

And now a break for cookies.

I remember eating Oreos most of the time in childhood, but we sometimes had Hydrox when we visited my mother's parents' house. The four of us daughters thought they were weird and old-fashioned, therefore (or maybe a knockoff, if we had such a concept at the time). 

But as it turns out, Hydrox were first (1908) and Oreos were the imitation (1912). According to the Wikipedia and its sources, Hydrox have a sweeter filling than Oreos and the cookie is crunchier, supposedly meaning it becomes less soggy in milk.

The name Hydrox is meant to imply "purity and goodness" somehow through reference to the elements that make up water. What a great example of early-20th-century thinking about brand names! The name Oreo, on the other hand, is of unknown origin, though I find the argument that it may come from a Latin plant name, Oreodaphne, persuasive:

the original design of the Oreo includes a laurel wreath; and the names of several of Nabisco's cookies at the time of the original Oreo had botanical derivations...

What got me thinking about all this was the imprinted designs on the two cookies. For some reason, the pattern printed into the surface on one or the other of them popped into my head the other day, and I realized their designs are of the time they're from, and I never noticed that before.

That means they're from roughly the same era as Cascarets, this sheet music, or close to that of this Bakelite button.

The New Abolitionism

I know the phrases "defund the police" and "abolish the police" are lightning rods. I remember when I first heard the phrase "abolish the police" at a protest, I was shocked. But, but, but, I thought, even though I knew how wrong our prisons are compared to many other examples in the world and how policing is based in the history of enslavement and still part of white supremacy.

This thread by attorney Aditi Juneja, who now works at the Democracy Project, has a lot of good thoughts about the why's and some beginnings of the how's.

It’s okay to change your mind about things or be curious about new ways to solve a problem. I went to law school knowing our criminal legal system was broken and thinking being a “good” prosecutor is how I could help fix it.

Now I believe in abolition. I’m going to share a bit about why/how my mindset shifted:

I worked for the Manhattan DA’s office for 2 years out of law school. I wrote non-victim misdemeanor complaints up that were used at arraignment when people are first charged with crimes.

My first few days in the office I was surprised to find that complaints are written almost entirely off of the police’s account of what happened. They sign/swear to it but there’s no need to corroborate it at the phase where complaints are being drafted.

This might seem like it’s not a big deal because this is just the phase where people are being charged with crimes. The problem? Most people take plea deals for non-victim misdemeanors at arraignment (when they’re first being charged).

Another thing that surprised me: Most non-victim misdemeanors are for “crimes” that cost the city/community more money to enforce than the harm the crime does to the community. For example, shoplifting. From arrest to arraignment, it costs the city like 5k.

And you might think...but if we don’t arrest/prosecute people for shoplifting, everyone will do it! We need a deterrent! But all the studies show that the thing that deters people from committing “crimes” is certainty of getting caught. Not the severity of punishment.

Additionally, as you start to look at who gets arrested and where what you see is where and policing happens and who can afford privacy effects a lot of who gets caught up in our system. For example, Black and white people do drugs at the same rates. But Black people get arrested at much higher rates.

Why is that? It’s where cops police and who smokes weed inside their suburban house vs. in the park in a city.

Similarly, you see people get caught up in our system because our systems are confusing. You see people with hundreds of arrests for unlicensed general vending bc getting a street vendors license is confusing, especially if your English isn’t very good!

You see people arrested for driving without a license whose license got suspended because they didn’t pay tickets. But they have to work to pay off those tickets, so what do we do? Arrest them for driving without a license and give them more fines

There are a lot of crimes that are crimes of poverty and crimes that are only crimes for certain people bc of the neighborhoods in which the police spend their time.

I left the DA’s office thinking we should decriminalize those crimes and direct people to resources instead.

The summer after my 1L year, I worked at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. While I was there, I learned about a few things I didn’t know before, including pre-trial detention, mental health and the criminal legal system, school to prison pipeline, and sex offender reentry.

Pre-trial detention: so we all know we’re innocent until proven guilty? That’s only true if you have money. If you don’t, you can be held in jail before you’ve had a trial or due process bc your family can’t pay bail. As we look at how to change that we find a few things

First, the federal system doesn’t do bail the way the state/local systems do. They have a requirement to look for alternatives/a pre-trial approach that guarantees appearance but doesn’t have people detained. So we already know we don’t need bail to work like this. Also, with the increase in bail funds. We see people appear at over like 95% rates even when their bail is being paid by someone else.

So how do we access alternatives to cash/money bail? In some states, laws need to be changed so there are options beyond money bail. Bail bondsman lobby against those changes. In New York, the law already has those options! So why don’t they get used? Because judges often set the pre-trial conditions prosecutors ask for. Usually cash bail. This makes changes quite challenging because it’s not an issue of law. It’s an issue or custom. It’s about changing habits and the internal policy of the DA’s office. When I look at candidates running for DA in New York, I always look at what their platform says about cash bail

Now let’s talk about mental health and the criminal legal system. When mental health institutions were disbanded in the 1960s, they were supposed to be replaced by community health centers. But they never were. So what happened instead? People were incarcerated.

And now what we see is there are a small group of people who move between the criminal legal system, hospitals and homeless shelters and use up A LOT of government resources while never really getting the help they need. When I was at MOCJ in summer of 2015, they were working to identify those people and provide them with a lot of support - housing, health services, a caseworker etc. to keep folks out of jails/prisons. Why? Because it would actually save the city money

Another thing I learned more about, as I mentioned, the school to prison pipeline. In many schools across the US, there are cops, but not counselors/therapists. When kids do things kids do (eg hit someone), they don’t just get suspended, they get arrested.

I was a kid who hit a lot of people. From K-12, I was suspended probably 10 times? I’ve never been arrested. Why? Because my school didn’t have cops. What schools do? You guessed it - schools where students are nonwhite and where students are poor.

If you get arrested as a kid, you’re missing time in class. And the more time you miss, the more you’re likely to drop out.

Did you know there's a school on Rikers Island? They have to have one because you can get charged as an adult at 16. I’ve been there. It’s a great school — small class sizes, personalized learning, culturally competent curriculum, trauma-informed teachers, enough counselors for every student to meet with one daily. Students say it’s the best experience they’ve had at school and they perform well.

The principal of that school told us that he can predict who’ll end up on Rikers with 3 things: 1) Zip code, 2) days of school missed in 8th grade and 3) if they’re not white (white families can usually pull together bail). We know the risk factors but we don’t prevent it. Kids have to wait until they’re literally in jail to have a supportive classroom experience, 3 meals and a stable living situation.

Seems like it would be less expensive to provide those things before folks end up in jail

Last thing I worked on that summer: sex offender management/reentry. I wrote a memo on what happens when people who were convicted of sex crimes get released from jails/prisons and back into community (which happens for the VAST majority of people convicted of these crimes).

A few things happen:
1) You get put on the sex offender registry
2) It’s almost impossible to find housing
3) It’s almost impossible to find employment

First, the sex offender registry in New York has levels that are supposed to correlate to your risk to the community. In 2015, the way they assessed that risk in New York was using a tool that was completely made up and had no correlation to likelihood to reoffend. It was junk science.

Second, being on the list means it’s really hard to find housing. There are few places that let sex offenders live there. As a result, people end up in violation of their parole because they’re living near/in proximity to other sex offenders. That can get you back in prison

It’s also really hard to find a job as a sex offender. And people need to eat. So, they often turn to illegal ways to make money. That also violates parole and gets people back in jails/prisons.

The system sets people up to fail.

Now you might be thinking, “Okay, Aditi. But there are serious crimes. Are we really going to let murders and rapists not be in prison?” Well, my 2L summer I worked at the Brooklyn DA’s office prosecuting felony sex crimes. I saw a few things there:

One, I saw people who had been victims of sex crimes now perpetrating sex crimes. I asked prosecutors how that was accounted for in sentencing and what treatment people got if that was their situation. The answers? It wasn’t, and none.

Second, I noticed a lot of the victims/perpetrators were low income and people of color. I asked about that. Brooklyn is diverse and white folks definitely experience these types of crimes and perpetrate them. The response?

For poor folks, it's often the only way to access resources — mental health services etc. Wealthier folks can access those things in other ways. Money buys you privacy.

I really struggled to understand how incarcerating people without any type of treatment/support only to send them back into community was helpful. It seemed like they might be worse when they got out and do more harm. Also it wasn’t clear to me the process was helping survivors. I left thinking we needed to do a lot more to support survivors so they didn’t perpetuate further harm. And we needed to focus a lot more on prevention - comprehensive sex education that teaches about consent.

One other thing I learned in law school? Murder has the lowest recidivism rate. So, if we’re worried about that people repeat offending. This isn’t the crime to worry about. Now maybe that’s because of long sentences, people do “age out” of committing crime.

Last year, I learned that police only solve about half of murders. And I read a lot about what types of murders exist - intimate partner violence, gang violence, murders committed during robberies or other crimes. Again, it seems like a lot more could be done to prevent them

So, I now believe in abolition. After thinking we should shrink the system — decriminalize some crimes, direct people to resources, do more prevention, provide more public defenders — I realized the system is not keeping us safe. And it’s doing a lot of harm.

I believe the vast majority of crimes don’t need to be crimes at all. I think with more resources into prevention and making sure people have the support to live we could reduce the amount of crime overall. And I’m learning about other models of accountability and justice

I also want to say that I think a lot about the harm I did while I was on this journey by participating and working within this system. I haven’t figured out how to repair that harm. But it’s not lost on me what I did.

And when I think about the harms of the system as a whole, I don’t think it comes close to being worth the benefits it may have for a few.

I think we need to abolish the whole thing and pour those resources into prevention and other tools for accountability.

This Why Is This Happening podcast, where Chris Hayes talks with prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, gives a good feeling of the core perspective on abolitionism. Her new book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us, came out in February.

I Don't Know, But I Follow

This from University of Pennsylvania professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas had me in tears just now. She was responding to a statement from another Black woman, who said, "I just...don't know how Black educators keep going." Ebony (Dr. Thomas) replied in her own thread,

We have to realize that existence and meaning are outside this spacetime. It is the only way.

The present is unbearable.

But whenever I think beyond my grandparents' generation, when I reach back imaginatively... I hit a wall that my ancestors put up.

From Rosewood to Ocala, from Ocoee to Okahumpka, from the Mississippi River Flood to my great-grandfather death's at the hands of a Selma mob (where are the records of this? he just disappeared and I am searching and searching).

And that is just my great-grandparents' generation.

Their parents were all born enslaved. So were their parents. And their parents. And so on.

Digitized records help. The archives help. The blessed work of colleagues who do this psychologically devastating work certainly helps.

We are their futures.

And we will be the ancestors of others.

Some of this lifetime isn't for us. It is for others who will never know what we have experienced. Who will not know what we are feeling today.

We work. We endure. We stand for their sake.

Cast your hope deep into the future. That's how you go on.

(Someone did that for you, long ago. You are their living dream.)

An air freshener hanging from the mirror... or an expired plate when those are allowed because of COVID... confusing your taser for your gun when there wasn't even a reason to use the taser in the first place...

More Names, Video, Trauma, Death

As we head into what is probably the final week of testimony in the Derek Chauvin trial, when the defense will put on what it can of a case for this killer, we've just had a weekend with news from Virginia of Black Army Lieutenant Caron Nazario, who was maced and assaulted by a cop for driving while Black, and now that of Daunte Wright, a Black 20-year-old man shot and killed by a cop in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center this afternoon. Police in riot gear are there escalating the situation even as I write this.

The video of the cop screaming at and assaulting Lieutenant Nazario is heart-rending. But there are already white cop-apologists blaming him. It's incredible. 

As Navy intelligence veteran Naveed Jamali put it on Twitter, 

Why is it that the “you must comply with police orders” people are the same ones who don’t want to follow mask-wearing rules?

To which Phillip Atiba Goff responded with this meme graphic to sum up that world view:

__

I usually don't trust things that run in Newsweek these days, but this story appears to be based on actual reporting about the police department involved in the Nazario assault.

The Other Ones

I have some very special Facebook friends, and I mean that seriously. I appreciate them and wish I could see them in person instead of just online these days.

One is a former longtime coworker who is a Korean transnational adoptee. She married a guy whose parents were Korean immigrants in the 1960s, so that makes him first generation Korean American and her a Korean immigrant. He's an academic researcher in psychology, studying transnational and transracial adoption. She's now a genetic counselor (though I knew her in her previous career as a graphic designer... she's a talented person!).

His brother is an artist and cartoonist, and it turns out he's been publishing a cartoon strip called The Other Ones online since the end of February this year. He describes it this way:

The Other Ones: the ones that revolve around the Peanuts gang, but are not in the Peanuts gang. The Other Ones, the ones that act and react within the sphere of Peanutsville, USA. The Other Ones, the ones that have experiences unique to the BIPOC community and, yet, maybe not so unique.

My friends have been sharing some of the strips on Facebook off and on for the past month or so. Maybe the shares started right after the shootings in Atlanta? 

I just realized the strip has a website (rather than only being on Instagram... I avoid Instagram), so I'm finally posting about it now. Plus, today's strip has a tie-in that pushed me even more.

First the setup. As it says on the website, where were the BIPOC people in Peanutsville, other than Franklin?

Today's strip is a great example of what the cartoonist, identified on the cartoon's site only as Lee, had in mind when he wrote these words on the About page:

I wrestle with both the past and the future while trying to remain present with the characters and setting. While wanting to remain true to the ever-present-1973-feel of the Peanuts world, I feel compelled to move the characters into 2021 and the issues we face today. And, yet, I recognize that many of the issues we wrestled with in 1973 are, sadly, still present today.

By coincidence (or not) I saw that strip posted on the same day my friend posted about an upcoming virtual conference on genetic testing for adoptees:

Rudd Adoption Program Virtual Conference: Genetic Testing for Health & Birth Search

During this live session, we will explore the different benefits and risks posed by genetic testing and genetic counseling, as well as look into the factors that drive adoptees and adoptive parents to attempt to uncover answers through genetics. We will be speaking with researchers, Greg Barsh, Heewon Lee, Richard Lee, and Tom May who have focused their work on investigating the various options available to adoptees' while on their journey to discover answers through genetic testing. Sign up for the conference here

Just a few days earlier, I had seen a thread on Twitter by Martha Crawford, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, retweeted by Nicole Chung, who is also a Korean adoptee and author of the National Book Award-nominated memoir All You Can Ever Know. The tweets are not related in the sense of being about genetic testing, but they are about transracial adoption by white parents, which is the most common form of transracial adoption in this country:

In the past, when I would lead conversations with white adoptive  parents, knowing that there are all kinds of parents at all different stages of awareness of their (our)  whiteness/complicity — I would tread lightly and carefully, trying to help them across the shame line.

I would do this for their kids sake — but as I’ve gotten older, and more — I dunno — CROTCHETY, I try to be aware of parents' willingness to characterize adoptees as “angry” when they share painful content — and so somewhere along the way, I just decided it was better for me to deflect that and to be the one who makes them the most uncomfortable.

I am no longer cautious and tender. I no longer coddle white parents who choose  whiteness over their kids. Now I’m just like: Yeah. Whatever. WALK THROUGH THE FIRE, tell your other white people to STOP IT and suck up your discomfort because that is what your kids deserve from you.

Basically: I’ve become a disinhibited impatient crone and I don’t have the soft edges and endless patience that I used to.

Just: be braver. Face the scary shit, so they aren’t facing it all alone. Be your bravest self for your kids or why are you doing this at all?

Just be aware — before you stick me in front of a room of white adoptive parents. I have completely lost my filter.

As the cartoonist Lee says on the Brief History page of The Other Ones site, in describing how he grew up as a Korean kid in Connecticut and then came to create the strip:

I have seen that people are not inherently good as we’ve been told, but basically not good. I have been reminded that it is our task in life to learn how to be good. And the only way I know of learning how to be good is by having opportunities to teach and learn from.

Teaching and learning require honesty. Sometimes that's subtle and humorous, and a cartoon is a good method. Sometimes it's a crotchety crone using her white privilege.

__

Here are a few more of The Other One strips that I saw shared on Facebook:

 





I want this work to become a book or reach a wider audience some way.

No Good Reason to Use It

After all of this time, why would a non-Black writer or speaker not use "N-word," opting for the full word instead? What does using the offensive word get you that the substitute word does not?

It seems pretty clear that the only reason to use the full word is to be antagonistic and signal to racists that you're with them. Even if you use it in quotes, or you're talking about someone else using the word, you're still using the word: you're making other people read it or hear it.

The list of reasons to use it as "N-word" is longer:

• you acknowledge that the word's history represents something so hurtful and vile that it should not be said or written
• that it's not a word for non-Black people to use
• that you are not trying to punch down with your words
• that you are not aligning yourself with racists.
  

Maybe you feel awkward or fake by using "N-word," but so what? You feel slightly uncomfortable. Your grammar and usage feelings are hurt. Meanwhile, all the people who've been hurt by that word and what it represents in our history of oppression won't be.

Which one matters more?

Just remember: your word choice says who you are aligning yourself with.

___

When I woke up thinking about this and sat down to write it, it came accompanied by a memory.

White readers, what uses of the N-word were natural to you (or were naturalized for you)?

I remember one.

At Christmas time, we would often got a box of mixed nuts from a family member. One of them was the Brazil nut, which you may also have heard used to be called a N-word-toe.

I don't remember who told me that was its name. A grandparent, maybe? I think I already knew enough to understand why it made "sense" as a visual reference (that is, I knew what the N-word meant and what a toe is, and could see that the nuts are elongated and sometimes still had their brown skin). So that tells me how far back my knowledge of the N-word goes: before I can remember.

I also remember my mother telling me to call them Brazil nuts instead, too, but that came later.

What I didn't know until recently is that the name may not be just a general reference to resemblance, but a specific reference to amputated toes. Toes of enslaved people. After all, the nuts do come from Brazil and South America, which was the part of the Western Hemisphere that received the majority of the ships during the Middle Passage.

All the more reason to make sure the term goes out of usage.

A Gooey Sign of the End Times

Before Mafia Mulligan made everything 1000% worse, I used to have recurring moments when I would see something — usually a product — and think, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, That is a sign of the end times. 

I just realized today that I haven't had one of those thoughts for a while, and that it was probably because of the horrors of the past four to five years.

Today I saw a video for a product that made me cringe and laugh at the same time, thinking exactly the way I used to: This is a ridiculous thing, but also useful in this absurdly unsustainable world we have created, and therefore symbolic of how our way of life deserves to end.

Ready? Here it is: a reusable dust-cleaning gel you can use to touch up all those hard-to-deal-with spots in your car. (You really should check out the video on that page.)

Even more special: this product comes in green, yellow, or blue!

The writing on the page is not quite of the sort that would be done by a native English-speaker. A few examples:

Try to find some tools to improve the efficiency of cleaning these places? Want to make the cleaning a little bit fun? Our Dust Cleaning Gel is here for all your need!!!

Sticking the dust and dirt thoroughly by pressing it onto the surfaces that you would like to clean.

Simply put the gal on the surface that you want to clean

If it do flow into some small cracks because of time, please be patient and stick them out with the remaining large part of the gel.

After receiving the item. We recommend keeping the refrigerator cooler before use.

But that adds to the fun, I guess.

U.S. Deaths by Suicide, 2020: Not Increased

From epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs, reporting CDC data up through 2020:

Politicians told us repeatedly that lockdowns were causing increased numbers of deaths by suicide. We kept asking to see the data. Now, we have it, and apparently, this was not true. In 2020, deaths by suicide were lower than in the previous three years:

(click to enlarge)

There are many interesting trends visible across the years in that table: the startling stability of the cancer deaths, but clear increases Alzheimers, stroke, and heart disease, with possible hidden COVID deaths under both in 2020. It's also possible there are hidden suicides in the unintentional injuries column. 

It's understandable that influenza and pneumonia are combined in one line, since in most years they are related, but it's unfortunate in this year, since we know there were almost no cases of influenza. So the relatively constant number of deaths from pneumonia in 2020 must be from some other cause... such as COVID, perhaps?

The full article from JAMA is here.

Flips of the Tongue, April 2021

It's been about six months since my last post with funny usage examples I've seen or heard.

"We’re going to watch Mpls Crime Sore, watch the businesses leave..." An interweb comment, in case that's not obvious. The police seem to be very sore, maybe people committing crime are sore, but I don't think the crime is sore.

"Keep your head to the grindstone." Said by a friend. Ouch.

"Wiped under the rug." Said by a prosecutor on MSNBC who was talking about Trump's pardons.

"Absorbent amounts of money..." Written by a youngish person, maybe not a native English speaker, in a post about headphones on Medium. (I've seen an image of a dollar bill printed onto sponge material, if that counts.)

"They’ve been in a potato leg race since the beginning..." Said by an expert commentator on MSNBC about COVID vaccines.

"The fantasy that Meet the Press is fine dirt of hollowed ground of journalism..." Written by someone on Twitter. I don't know what "fine dirt" means, and then there's the "hollowed ground," too. Whew.

"Taking the political purse on Twitter." From Twitter, of course.

"Dapple a bit in politics." (I'm not sure what this is from.)

A writer of an opinion piece was described as sounding “calloused.” Again, I'm not sure where I saw this.

"We anticipate that this might be the first domino to drop." From a quote in an AP story about changing the definition of "metropolitan statistical area."

"Dedicated monotonous relationships." From a Facebook post... possibly a joke, but it was written by a person who makes enough typos that it’s hard to tell.

"Marriage is not a full proof strategy to living, having skills and experience." This is from Twitter, and the person wrote the phrase "full proof" twice, so it wasn't a typo.

And finally, the peas-of-resistance, this thread from Twitter. Cory Doctorow, who likes to post mid-century ads and other images, posted this image:

To which another user responded:

"For when you want your partner to have the pallet of an 8 year old."

And another user asked:

"Is that for child-size shipping containers?"

Ah, the classic pallet / palate / palette homonym. It never gets old. What a great language this is.

___

Other flips of the tongue posts:

• September 2019
• February 2019
• June 2017
• September 2014
• August 2013
• December 2010
• December 2008
• June 2008 
• March 2008 
• January 2008 
  
• December 2007 
  
  

The Thing to Remember

This is the thing to keep in your mind every time you hear about reducing CO2 by 20% or 50% or even 100% by 2050, or whatever version of that (which we hear constantly) is tossed around:

Most people don't realise this, but the majority of high-income nations have already significantly exceeded their fair share of the carbon budget for 2 degrees. Their "zero by 2050" targets are therefore woefully inadequate.
Jason Hickel

He presented those words with this graph:

(click to enlarge)

The high-income nations have had ours. We need to stop putting out greenhouse gases as close to now as possible, with concrete plans that start with dates in the extreme near-term. 

We need to do it in an equitable way, and we need to build political will to do that. 

Those are the tasks we face.

 

Training for Peace-Keeping

Within a few days of when Derek Chauvin killed (murdered, executed) George Floyd late last May, we knew that Chauvin was a field training officer (FTO) in the Minneapolis Police Department, and that he was still the trainer of one of the rookie cops on the scene. Which led and still leads most people to ask, What the hell is the MPD training its cops to do?

Today the Star Tribune's Libor Jany had a story about that very question, headlined MPD's mentor cops get little supervision. I recommend the whole article, but here are the parts I couldn't help underlining (!) as I was reading it.

• "Over his 19 years with MPD, Chauvin...racked up 17 misconduct complaints and was involved in four on-duty shootings or other fatal encounters." [Remember, the average cop in this country never draws their gun.]
• "Former...officials said...the problem is that there are no hard and fast rules about who can be a training officer. Those selected...have to complete a week of training...but then tend to stay...for years with little oversight and less accountability."
• A Japanese-American trainee sued the department last year about harassment by FTOs, "including one time [when a FTO] allegedly chastised him for refusing to slap a drunk man during an arrest in north Minneapolis, saying, 'You missed a free slap.'"
• A retired deputy chief wondered how much the rookie cops' trainers had affected them in their interactions with George Floyd. In an interview, he told Jany it was notable "how quickly their arrest of Floyd over a fake $20 bill escalated into [Officer] Lane yelling at Floyd to 'show me your [expletive] hands!'"
• Getting so-called "good cops" to be FTOs appears to be part of the problem. It doesn't pay more, except as overtime, and so it may attract only people who are attracted to the power trip. (It seems to me that a department would have to build a teaching culture around it as well as pay more for it. And since real teaching is likely to be perceived as feminized, there may be some other elements of the problem that need to be addressed.)
• There's a peer-intervention training program for police departments called Ethical Policing Is Courageous, which started in New Orleans. Saint Paul participates in it, but Minneapolis does not.

Near the end of the story, Jany delivers what may be part of the real policy solution:

A recent report by the Council on Criminal Justice Task Force on Policing found that most U.S. police training lacks focus, is too short, uses ineffective teaching methods and is out of touch with both community safety priorities and current research about what works to minimize bias and use of force.

The report also found that most officers receive an average of six months of training, far less than is required of their counterparts in other developed countries, and that standards vary widely among states. Training requirements for officers are on par with those for professions that require little human interaction, such as pest control and water-well drilling.

The study's authors, which included law enforcement, civil rights and community leaders, made a number of recommendations and called on the federal government to adopt national standards to assure appropriate training for all officers. (emphasis added)

All of this made me think of a Star Tribune op-ed by Melvin Carter, Jr. from last summer. (He's the father of Saint Paul's mayor — who is Melvin Carter III.) Carter Jr. is a retired Saint Paul cop, and the headline of his article was Define policing, once again, as a peacekeeping endeavor:

The term “law enforcement” has hijacked the peacekeeping mission over the past century. It emphasizes force and implies suppression and oppression, which I consider a betrayal. I cringe at its every utterance, especially when hearing police officials use the term in opposition to “community policing.”

The goals of community policing are:

1. To prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to suppression by military force.
2. To depend on public approval and to maintain public respect.
3. To achieve police objectives by means of public cooperation.
4. To earn public trust and cooperation, which declines proportionately with the use of force.
5. To nurture public favor by means of fairness and good-faith services.
6. To always use the minimum degree of force, and only after persuasion, advice and warnings fail.
7. To recognize that police are the public and that the public are the police.
8. To refrain from corruption.
9. To evaluate police effectiveness as the presence of peace, not on the visible use of aggressive enforcement.

I imagine I would not agree with Mr. Carter on everything, but for sure he's on a better track than 90-some percent of his former colleagues and coworkers. The thing I know I can trust about him is that when he says "the public," he means the whole public, and not just white people — which is what way too many people mean by "the public."

Getting rid of qualified immunity, the training changes recommended by the criminal justice task force... there's a big range of changes needed, including the funding changes that fall under that abused heading "defund the police." Culture changes and training are part of it.